Gathara's World

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Friday, February 20, 2015

For nearly a week now, three of Kenya’s major privately-owned
TV stations have been off air due to a row with the industry regulator over
migration to a digital platform. The stations, NTV, Citizen TV and KTN, which
together account for the vast majority of TV viewership in the country (they
claim up to 90 percent), have had a long running and convoluted battle with the
Communications Authority essentially demanding a license to broadcast their own
content as opposed to handing it over to the two carriers the government has
licensed.

It is said that truth is often the first casualty of war.
This has been no exception. As both sides have sought to sway public opinion to
their cause, honesty and objectivity have been tossed out the window. On the
one hand, the government has tried to paint it as a fight
to tame intransigent, monopolistic-minded media companies scared of the level
field that comes with digital migration. On the other, the companies have
portrayed it as a struggle
against a deaf, authoritarian-minded regime intent on auctioning off national
resources to the Chinese (one of the licensed carriers is Chinese).

While there has been more than enough mud to go round, and
though the incompetence
of the regulator is hard to ignore, it is clear that the TV companies seem to be coming off worst. The are probably two reasons for this. Most Kenyans don't watch TV and those that do have a hard time trusting the media.

Let's start with the latter. The merits of it's case aside, government’s propaganda has tapped into a rich vein of
distrust and contempt for the media, one that, ironically, has grown out of the
fraternity’s uncritical embrace of the Uhuru Kenyatta administration.

The Kenyan press is struggling with the legacy of its anodyne
reporting during the flawed 2013 election and subsequent reluctance to
challenge the official narrative and government conduct on most issues and
events. These include during the President’s trial at the International
Criminal Court, the responses to terrorist attacks, including the attack on the
Westgate Mall and the targeting of the Somali and Muslim communities, as well
as the continuing demonization of civil society.

Further, the TV stations' fascination with Mexican soaps and Nigerian movies, when most television consumers are mainly interested in the news, cannot do their reputation much good.

The media"s one-sided reporting
of the digital migration impasse has not helped matters. Journalists have seemed either unable or
unwilling to separate the interests of media conglomerates from those of the
public. On the contrary, they have simply tried to sell the company line as the national cause. This is not
new. Research
carried out in 2012 found that “the line between media owners and editors has
increasingly been blurred as the latter are co-opted into the formers’ domain,
meaning the editors no longer exclusively pursue professionalism.”

If poll numbers are to be believed, public trust in the
media is very brittle. Over three years ago when one survey
found 77 percent of respondents saying they trusted the media. Just four months
after the 2013 election, this had dropped
to 46 percent before rising to 68 percent in November and collapsing
again to 43 percent in March last year. The lesson here? Public trust is a
commodity the Kenyan media takes for granted at its peril. As Peter Oborne recently wrote
in his resignation statement as chief political commentator of the UK’s Telegraph: “There is a purpose to journalism, and it
is not just to entertain. It is not to pander to political power, big
corporations and rich men. [The media has a] duty to tell … the truth.”

The other reason the TV companies are losing this is that most of the country doesn't watch TV. “Starve
the city dwellers and they riot; starve the peasants and they die. If you were
a politician, which would you choose?" asked an aid-worker in Lloyd
Timberlake’s 1988 book, Africa in Crisis. The current “crisis” has proven that
not all audiences are created equal. Some matter more than others.

A relatively small, TV-owning minority punches above its
weight in political terms. Two-thirds of Kenyan households do not actually own
a television set, but politicians are scrambling to cater to the needs of the
one-third that do, even altering their calendars to accommodate them. The
launch of the OKOA Kenya campaign, for example, has been postponed
until the standoff is resolved, with opposition leader, Raila Odinga, declaring
“There can be no amendment of the constitution without the people and their can
be no people without the media."

The fact is, despite radio being far and away the main
source of news for the vast majority of Kenyans, the fact is TV is king in urban
areas. The medium has overthrown the newspaper as the mediator of elite political discourse in the country.

For the rest of the country, the promise of impressive
clarity and variety is largely empty. Debates about cost and availability of
set-top boxes are largely irrelevant for the 70 percent of the population who
cannot even afford TV sets and the 80 percent who have no electricity to run
them on. As Eng Francis Wangusi, the Director-General of the Communications
Authority said
recently, “If somebody can buy and maintain a TV in their house, that person is
not poor.” He could have added that most Kenyans are poor.

Beyond what the media have got wrong, perhaps we as a country should consider expanding the scope of the
discussion beyond just digital TV migration. According to one survey, by 2011, 93
percent of Kenyan households owned a mobile phone. Maybe the phone could do for
TV what it has done for money transfer and banking. Mobile TV could allow the
poor to access the digital TV services that are now slated to be the preserve of
a lucky few. So instead of only talking about STBs, digital transmitters and
distribution licenses, perhaps our tech and policy wonks could also spend some
of the time debating the merits of providing affordable mobile TV to all.

Sunday, February 15, 2015

In an article last month, economist Dr David Ndii expounded on the changes that the country’s 2010 constitution
has rung in as well as the reduced opportunities for extraction of rents. He opined
that the imperial presidency, traditionally the bane of Kenya’s democracy, had
been effectively dismantled and that devolution had dramatically reduced the
payoffs for corruption if not exactly ensured accountability. “There just
aren’t that many large carcasses for all the big ravenous hyenas in Nairobi.
The cheese has moved. The rats have not. They slept through the revolution,” he
wrote.

However, recent actions by the government of President Uhuru
Kenyatta demonstrate that not only have the rats refused to acknowledge the
revolution, they are actively undermining it and re-instituting the networks
and power relationships that have sustained them for over half a century.

It is not the first time this has happened.

Just before independence in 1963, the country adopted a new
constitution that similarly sought to constrain the power of the governing
elites. A 1992 paper by Prof Githu Muigai, now the country’s Attorney General, explained
what followed. "The colonial order had been one monolithic edifice of power
that did not rely on any set of rules for legitimization. When the Independence
constitution was put into place it was completely at variance with the
authoritarian administrative structures that were still kept in place by the
entire corpus of public law. Part of the initial amendments therefore involved
an attempt - albeit misguided - to harmonise the operations of a democratic
constitution with an undemocratic and authoritarian administrative structure.
Unhappily instead of the latter being amended to fit the former, the former was
altered to fit the latter with the result that the constitution was effectively
downgraded."

Similarly, over the past few weeks, the country has seen legislation
introduced which reverses many of the democratic gains enshrined in the
constitution. Growing intolerance has seen laws enacted by the colonial regime
to stop the independence movement employed to prosecute two bloggers for insulting
President Kenyatta, with one sentenced
to a two-year jail term.

Just as his father, founding President, Jomo Kenyatta, progressively
downgraded the independence constitution and to recreate the colonial edifice,
so today Uhuru Kenyatta is engaged in the process of undermining the 2010
constitution and once again concentrating power within the walls of one office
and in the hands of one man.

However, the first President Kenyatta would not have
accomplished his fete without the acquiescence and support of the rest of the
power elite who were rewarded with opportunities to corruptly enrich
themselves. Similarly today, his son needs the help of his fellow elites to
reconstitute the system of autocratic kleptocracy and patronage that was
perfected by jomo Kenyatta’s successor, President Daniel arap Moi. And that
help has not been short in coming.

Dr Ndii reckons the constitution has stripped the Presidency
of 80-90 percent of its power and that today the President has to exercise
what’s left through influence and not authority. However, that does not appear
to be the way things are actually working out. With his coalition controlling
both houses, the President faces little opposition from a Parliament that
appears more concerned about taking full advantage of opportunities to fleece the public. The hurried and chaotic passage of the security law, along with the Senate’s acquiescence in its own marginalisation, demonstrated just how much it has been
transformed into a paper tiger. The judiciary has fared little better. From the
craven
Supreme Court judgement over the 2013 presidential election to the inaction
over regular infringements of its orders, the judiciary has proven itself to be
unwilling to court Executive displeasure.

Ditto the National Police Service. After decades of doing
the executive’s dirty political work instead of actually protecting the public,
one might have expected that they might revel in some independence. One would
be wrong. And even before the passage of the security law, there was already a
concerted effort
to bring the service back under the ambit of the Executive.

The fact is, the constitution may have prescribed a weaker presidency,
but when the institutions that are meant to check its power instead opt to collude
with it, it can be pretty powerful. Especially as a conduit for and dispenser
of patronage, the traditional role the imperial presidency has played for the
political elite. And true to form, President Kenyatta has kept the gravy train
rolling.

On his watch, government mega-projects, whether it is the dubious $13 billion standard
gauge railway or the stalled
$200 million project to provide laptops to primary school students, or the nearly
$400 million single-sourced
national surveillance system, have all been tinged with scandal and
controversy. Just a year after his inauguration, the President authorised
the payment of nearly $17 million to two shell companies, part of the Anglo Leasing scam which cost the country over $600 million. And just recently came
revelations that the government had silently prepared legislation prohibiting public scrutiny of its spending on the
military, intelligence and police, after the Auditor General raised queries on $100
million in expenditure and cash transfers from the Ministry of Defence. And as
poachers decimate the country’s elephants and rhinos, at least one
investigative report showed
that the government not only knew who they were but actually provided
protection to the kingpins.

Following independence, it took Jomo Kenyatta a few years to
dismantle the constitutional restraints on the Presidency. His son seems to
have taken up the task with gusto. Like his father, he argues that the
authoritarian powers are necessary. On the other hand, Dr Ndii believes that the
orgy of looting that is underway is actually “an unintended and transient
consequence of [the constitution’s] effectiveness.” However what remains abundantly
clear that, it will take more than a new constitution to save Kenya from its
rapacious elites.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

When the prolific columnist, Charles Onyango-Obbo, wrote
that the International Criminal Court “had finally made Kenya an African
country” he meant that the government’s reaction to the trials had aligned the
country more closely with policies in much of the rest of the continent. I
think there is another, perhaps more profound, sense in which Kenyans have
become Africans.

To begin with, I have always been uncomfortable with the
notion of “Africa”. It has not been apparent to me what, apart from an
overabundance of pigmentation, I am supposed to possess in common with most of
the other billion or so residents of the second-largest continent. And far from
simply describing people from a place, the term “African” has come to imply some
sort of historical, metaphysical and supra-cultural bond, which is loaded with
all sorts of flattering and not-so-flattering stereotypes.

Sadly, many of my fellow Africans have been content to
reflect and enact the tropes of Africanness. A favourite one is that of the
“African Big Man.” No, I don’t mean of the well-hung variety, but rather the kleptocratic and genocidal tyrant-for-life who nonetheless commands the
unquestioning loyalty of his tribal folk because their only goal in life is the
extermination of their ethnic rivals.

The African Union has become an unfailing mirror of these
reflections. At Its summits, the continent’s Big Men (and few Big Women), regularly
get together, it seems, to commit ever more outrages on our common
sensibilities. At Kenya’s instigation, last year’s pow-wow in June in Malabo,
Equatorial Guinea, voted
to expand the jurisdiction of
the yet-to-be-established African Court of Justice and Human Rights to cover international
crimes, with the caveat that the Big Men as well as their senior government pals
would be immune from prosecution while they remain in office. The move was
meant to deliver Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy, William Ruto,
from the clutches of the ICC. And it was welcomed by their fellow Big Men who
are wont
to remain in office for rather longer than their subjects can reasonably expect
or tolerate.

Any idea of accountability in this life is an anathema.
Kenya today provides an excellent example of the state continually frustrating
any attempt to punish either current or former government officials or their
misdeeds. The report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, which
named almost every star in the country’s political firmament, seems to have met
its end in the National Assembly where it went to be “improved”
by the very people it mentioned adversely.

As a result, Kenya’s two fabulously wealthy and still-breathing
ex-presidents, Mwai Kiabaki and Daniel arap Moi continue to live lavishly on the public purse despite widespread reporting, countless
commissions of inquiry as well as interminable police investigations concluding
that their tenures were characterised by officially sanctioned murder and
theft. None of their senior officials have been pursued either. On the
contrary, the current administration has simply picked up where they left off. In fact, during the most recent AU summit, the
Kenya government maintained its single-minded determination to ensure that African potentates never again have to endure
the prospect of facing justice.

And a new crop of leaders is learning just how useful this
“Big Man” syndrome can be. Recently, two first-time legislators were caught on camera at a weighbridge trying to throw their weight around and
intimidate police. The problem? A truck belonging to one of them had been
impounded for not having the necessary paperwork. In less than two years, they
have learnt, that in the Big Man tradition, the rules don’t apply to them.

Of course impunity has always been a large part of Kenya’s
story. But with our support for the government's exertions at the AU, we appear to have thrown our hat in
with that community of nations that defines itself solely in terms of its
powerlessness. A site of perpetual victimhood, of constant and exhausting struggle
against imperialism and colonisation. A place of contradiction where the foreign-funded AU can, without the slightest appreciation of the irony, declare that the equally
foreign-funded ICC, where its members constitute the largest block, with an African
prosecutor and judges, is a tool of imperialists.

By becoming Africans, Kenyans have accepted to be faceless,
nameless victims. To have a cheap and expendable existence. To live at and for
the pleasure of Big Men. To repudiate “foreign” notions of accountability. We
have accepted that the continent should first deliver for the powerful, before
it delivers for the multitude. If that sounds familiar, it is because it should
be. To become an African is to go back to the roots of Africanness. To don the
costume of moral and material backwardness spun for the continent by the Big
Men from Europe who were determined to subjugate it and who have since been replaced
by our home grown varieties. It is, in short, to accept our place at the bottom
of the human pile.